rob toledo as a verb | on creating an unintentional Google bomb

Since I have a blog, you must know that I am practically Internet-famous. But you might not know that Stenton is not my first name. So now you’re probably asking yourself:

“Why Stenton? This seems so very silly. If your name is Rob, Wouldn’t you want to brand yourself accordingly?”

Yes, that would normally be the case. And perhaps if my last name was Smith or Miller or Smith-Miller, I might have done just that. However…

When you Google my name in quotes: “Rob Toledo” you get a few typical business listings: doctors, dentist offices, lawyers, insurance agents, all with whom I share my name. You also might get a few things actually referencing me: Twitter, various accounts across forums, etc. But the real gem… news stories.

this is not me, but he comes up when you Google my name

Not just any news stories, news stories about the various cities of Toledo (Ohio, Spain, Washington) and their respective local businesses being burgled: banks, Subways™, carryout restaurants, jewelry stores, etc. It appears that these men have no shame and nothing is left sacred. Subway doesn’t even accept bills above $20, meaning the most one might end up with can’t possibly break triple digits. But because they are using my namesake to try and slander my otherwise crystal clean reputation on the search engines, I am fairly convinced this is all an ill-conceived attempt by the Bank Tellers Association to prevent me from being able to ever regain employment at any financial institution because of my habit of waiving far too many overdraft fees and general belief in conspiracy theories.

these men are about to "rob toledo"

My other thought is what better way to assure I am never eligible for elected office by making sure within the next few years the phrase “rob toledo” is as synonymous with burglary as Rick Santorum is with… well, you know… (I have to confess, the only reason I offered that as an example was to find a way to optimize some anchor text directed to Dan Savage’s spectacularly optimized Google Bomb).

But so it goes.

Now a lesser person might sit back and allow such a tarnishing campaign to ruin their reputation. But I’m too smart for these foolish creators of verbs. This is America after all. I’ll show them a thing or two about branding, I ain’t no sucka! This isn’t my first rodeo! The good guy will always prevail! When the going gets tough, the tough get going! America! I do happen to know a thing or two about branding on the Internet, and plan fully to capitalize on this skill to rehabilitate my reputation.

My new goal is to brand the term “Rob Toledo” with something far superior to knocking off dealers of fresh, delicious, five dollar lunch options. Instead I aim to ensure this blog eventually comes up numero uno for the term. I plan on also branding this blog to return as the top result for the search term “world’s best quesadilla maker.” As well as “the smartest man in the world.” As well as “sarcastic asshole.” So if you run a blog and want to be part of something big, please consider those phrases as anchor text when linking to this site.

But if you’ve read this far, the real reason is robtoledo.com was already taken and has apparently been under construction since 1998 when it was cool to include animated .gifs of a construction worker shoveling.